2 comments:

A year or so ago, I stood texting on Madison Avenue (I have never wanted to walk and text) and on getting out of the way of someone walking towards me, I slipped of the sloping curb and fell flat on my face next to the queue for Laduree. My thought as I fell (besides "oh f---" was "who queues for macaroons."

If I were to draw a lesson from this it would be not to text on Madison Avenue – as relevant a lesson as any other.

I, too, have never wanted to walk and text, when one can be so much more productive in gainful loitering. And like you, I allow the macaroons to come to me. But Madison is full of exemplary experiences, I fear, and I thank you for this gruesome reminder; so I ply my careful way on Park wherever possible.

Writing to a colleague in the 1930s, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli confessed, “I have done a terrible thing. I’ve postulated a particle that can not be detected.” Eventually, Pauli won the Nobel Prize for his Exclusion Principle, i.e., all material particles exhibit space-occupying behaviour - and could very well fall within the province of restaurants. I wonder if red mug, blue linen will be that terrible thing, a postulate without a particle - that a gentleman is only that creature whose nourishment occupies no space. But whether that is true, is less urgent to know than where it comes from.

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